Crypto Confidential

May 13, 2024
Eliason debuts with a conflicted memoir recounting his efforts to get rich quick with cryptocurrency. In 2021, Eliason was unemployed and worried about providing for his first child, who was due by the end of the year. Dazzled by acquaintances who had won big on crypto, he began day-trading Dogecoin and writing code for a video game based around crypto tokens. He describes how his anxiety over the possibility that his increasingly valuable holdings would lose their worth or get hacked kept him glued to his devices and left his wife feeling isolated. Though Eliason aims to position his story as a cautionary tale, the takeaway is complicated by the fact that he made a healthy sum after selling most of his crypto assets in early 2022, even if his unspecified final profit was significantly less than the $10 million his holdings were nominally worth at their peak. Further confusing the volume’s stance are interstitial chapters offering tips on investing in crypto (“You can create a simple rule, like: if goes down 50 percent, sell; if it doubles, sell half to cover the initial investment”). This is a head-scratcher. Agent: David Fugate, LaunchBooks Literary.

Starred review from July 15, 2024
A cautionary tale about the (frequent) pitfalls and (infrequent) profits in the cryptocurrency game. Borrowing a page and title from Anthony Bourdain'sKitchen Confidential, Austin-based "crypto insider" Eliason delivers the same sort of behind-closed-doors expos� of how things really work, in this case the shadowy world of cryptocurrency. He opens with a personal tale, chronicling how he watched aghast as the trading operation he'd put into place was hacked by a potential blackmailer. The hacker had something to work with, a nice pot of digital money that Eliason had assembled, and which represented early success: "A year earlier, I never could have dreamed of making this kind of money." Blame it all on his desire to learn how to code and then realizing that other coders weren't slogging at 9-to-5 jobs but instead gambling on crypto and making considerable, if often evanescent, fortunes. As Eliason and many other tech writers have shown, crypto is a gamble, one based on riding a boom until just before it busts and then selling while the selling is good. There's plenty of potential left in crypto, argues the author, especially given the inherently liberating possibilities of blockchain technology. There's also all the risk inherent in praying that the "greater fool theory" will hold long enough for the investor to make a few bucks--or a few million bucks--in the crypto marketplace. Eliason's anecdotes are both entertaining and instructive, and unlike many books on Bitcoin et al., this one doesn't require background in either computers or economics. More useful, and worth the price of admission, are his notes on the warning signs of disaster, one in particular being "when you think you've figured out the game and you're about to get insanely rich." Essential reading for anyone playing--or thinking of playing--in the crypto sandbox.

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